Print on demand is a way of selling personalised products, such as T-shirts, mugs, phone covers and posters, that are printed and shipped only after someone orders them. The seller holds no stock. A print-on-demand company does the printing, packing and shipping for each order, one item at a time.
It suits sellers who have a design and an audience, but no money to spend on stock. A creator, a band, a college club or a small brand can sell twenty designs in five sizes without printing a single T-shirt in advance. If a design does not sell, nothing is wasted.
Here is how an order is handled. The seller uploads a design and picks the products. The print-on-demand software makes a mockup, which is a picture of the design on the product, for the store page. The seller lists the product on an e-commerce platform, through an app that connects the store to the print-on-demand company. When a shopper buys, the app sends the order to the print-on-demand company. Its factory prints the item, packs it with the seller's label and hands it to an express courier network. The shopper sees only the seller's name.
Take a cricket podcast in Indore with 80,000 followers on Instagram. It sells a black T-shirt with its logo for ₹699. A follower in Ranchi orders one in size L. The print-on-demand company charges the podcast ₹380 for the T-shirt, the printing and the shipping. Within two days, its factory prints the logo straight onto the fabric, with an inkjet printer made for garments. This method is called direct-to-garment, or DTG, printing. The parcel reaches Ranchi five days after the order. The podcast keeps ₹319, before its payment gateway fee. If the follower bought through a link shared by another creator, that creator also earns a commission, through affiliate links for creators.
Mugs are printed differently. The design is printed on special paper, and then pressed onto the mug with heat, so that the ink becomes part of the mug's coating. This is called sublimation printing.
The trade-off is the cost of each item. Printing one T-shirt at a time costs more than printing 500 at once, and delivery takes a few days longer. So a seller whose design sells well may move to printing in bulk later.
Print on demand is different from online printing for small businesses, which combines many customers' cards and flyers on one sheet. In print on demand, each item is printed alone, on machines made for single pieces. The same idea of making a thing only when it is ordered is used for machine parts with a 3D printer.